Contemporary Militarism Research Articles

Faces of Polish Militarism

Contemporary militarism appears as a combination of historical, cultural and institutional factors that shape the political processes of the state. Militarism is most often combined with excessive political influence of officers, the proliferation of the apparatus of the armed forces and social attitudes drawn from military patterns. Relying on interdisciplinary findings to date, the author searches in the paper for manifestations of Polish militarism and argues that it adopts a discursive-ritual rather than an institutional model, despite unprecedented spending on armaments in 2023.

Resisting racial militarism: War, policing and the Black Panther Party

The past ten years have witnessed a revival in scholarship on militarism, through which scholars have used the concept to make sense of the embeddedness of warlike relations in contemporary liberal societies and to account for how the social, political and economic contours of those same societies are implicated in the legitimation and organization of political violence. However, a persistent shortcoming has been the secondary role of race and coloniality in these accounts. This article demonstrates how we might position racism and colonialism as integral to the functioning of contemporary militarism. Centring the thought and praxis of the US Black Panther Party, we argue that the particular analysis developed by Black Panther Party members, alongside their often-tense participation in the anti–Vietnam War movement, offers a strong reading of the racialized and colonial politics of militarism. In particular, we show how their analysis of the ghetto as a colonial space, their understanding of the police as an illegitimate army of occupation and, most importantly, Huey Newton’s concept of intercommunalism prefigure an understanding of militarism premised on the interconnections between racial capitalism, violent practices of un/bordering and the dissolving boundaries between war and police action.

What makes violence martial? Adopt A Sniper and normative imaginaries of violence in the contemporary United States

What makes violence martial? Contemporary militarism scholarship, owing to an analytical overdetermination of the role of military institutions, frequently conflates martiality with violence writ large. Drawing upon the illustrative case of Adopt A Sniper, a US military support charity founded by police officers operating during the global war on terror and intended to help supporters ‘directly contribute to the killing of the enemy’, this article interrogates the intuitive ‘line’ between martial and other, particularly colonial, forms of violence. To do so, I develop the concept of ‘normative imaginaries of violence’ – articulations of intersubjective beliefs; political community; spatial geographies; gendered, sexualized, racialized and classed power relations; and logics of legitimation. Through this lens, and informed by the work of Frantz Fanon, the article demonstrates that though coloniality and martiality are deeply intertwined, they are neither reducible to nor epiphenomenal of each other. Through a juxtaposition of the titular sniper with two additional figures invoked by Adopt A Sniper – the militiaman and the vigilante – I outline a novel, genealogical method that enables us to trace the entangled histories of contemporary violences and identify the implicit politics of ordering at work in existing, often fragmented, analyses of political violence.

Militarism, states and resistance in Africa: exploring colonial patterns in stabilisation missions

ABSTRACTThe article explores how stabilisation missions reproduce the patterns that constituted colonial states. Following African historiography, the article argues that stabilisation’s militarised approach to neutralising resistance, its racialisation of targets and its aim to constitute and reform state authority evoke how colonial states were forged by the inseparable relationship between authority, force, race, production and resistance. However, it will be shown that those patterns cannot be fully understood without an account of the broader structure of coloniality and imperialism. In so doing, the article aims to contribute to bring together different literatures on contemporary peace-building interventions and contemporary militarism by examining the relation between militarism, coloniality and imperialism. It focuses on the Democratic Republic of Congo to show how an intensified use of force against resistance, added to frames that see Congolese politics as deviant, has guided the goal of restoration of state authority, and with it, different economic reforms, all of which have reinforced the military and economic power of national and international elites, without reporting significant benefits to the population at large.

Controlling weapons circulation in a postcolonial militarised world

AbstractWhat are the politics of, and prospects for, contemporary weapons control? Human rights and humanitarian activists and scholars celebrate the gains made in the UN Arms Trade Treaty as a step towards greater human security. Critics counter that the treaty represents an accommodation with global militarism. Taking the tensions between arms transfer control and militarism as my starting point, I argue that the negotiating process and eventual treaty text demonstrate competing modes of militarism. Expressed in terms of sovereignty, political economy, or human security, all three modes are underpinned by ongoing imperial relations: racial, gendered, and classed relations of asymmetry and hierarchy that persist despite formal sovereign equality. This means human security is a form of militarism rather than the antithesis of it. Drawing on primary sources from negotiations and participant observation with actors involved in the campaign for the ATT, the argument challenges the idea that human security has scored a victory over militarism. It also complicates our understanding of the nature of the accommodation with it, demonstrating the transformation as well as entrenchment of contemporary militarism. The argument reframes the challenges for controlling weapons circulation, placing the necessity for feminist, postcolonial anti-militarist critique front and centre.

Return of the generals? Global militarism in Africa from the Cold War to the present

Militarism is always historically constructed and context specific and must therefore be studied at the intersection of the global and the local. This article does so by tracing the continuities and changes of global militarism in Africa from the Cold War to the present. It argues that contemporary global militarism on the continent differs from its predecessor in two crucial aspects. First, it is promoted by development actors as much as by military establishments and is more firmly embedded within discourses of development and humanitarianism. Second, contemporary militarism remains focused on political order and stability but it is more concerned with war and direct combat. The article probes this paradox through an engagement with the concepts of security and securitization. It argues that today’s militarism is suffused with the values of security and that it is precisely the logic of security and securitization that gives it its contemporary political force.

Peace education, militarism and neo-liberalism: conceptual reflections with empirical findings from the UK

This article explores ‘peace days’ in English schools as a form of peace education. From a historical overview of academic discussions on peace education in the US and Great Britain since the First World War, we identify three key factors important for peace education: the political context, the place in which peace days occur and pedagogical imperatives of providing a certain narrative of the sources of violence in politics. Although contemporary militarism and neoliberalism reduce the terrains for peace studies in English schools, peace days allow teachers to carve out spaces for peace education. Peace days in Benfield School, Newcastle and Comberton Village College, Cambridgeshire, are considered as case studies. We conclude with reflections on the opportunities and limitations of this approach to peace education, and on how peace educators and activists could enlarge its reach.

The Sublime Object of Militarism

Slavoj Žižek's analysis of ideology helps us to see that, far from hosting the end of ideology, the contemporary world is ideologically saturated. Ideology has come into its own via the development of doubling strategies that simultaneously articulate and hide the workings of ideologies. This is not a simple process of socialization or “brainwashing,” but a complex double move that facilitates identification and disidentification at the same time. Contemporary militarism performs the first move by separating regular life from the war, establishing the war to be “over there,” big but distant, not here. It enacts the second move by saturating our daily lives with war-ness, in the form of securitizing practices such as surveillance cameras, wire tapping, electronic locking systems, sign-in sheets, guards with clipboards and often guns; but the terms of the saturation reinforce the prior belief in the separation of the war from our lives. Today's wars carry on alongside “normal” life without seeming to interrupt it, pretending to separate it completely while it in fact saturates our lives.

Marvell's Dialogized Nymph

In "The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Faun," Andrew Marvell inserts multiple social languages into the traditional literary language of a complaining nymph and thereby tests that language in the face of outside linguistic pressures. The languages of contemporary militarism, British law, quasi-Christian theology, Canticles, and Marvell's own poetic practice enter the poem to reveal the instability and vulnerability of traditional literary languages in a period of rapid social change and extreme heteroglossia. By dialogizing the Nymph's language of complaint, then, Marvell refracts the social disorder of his time.

Contemporary Militarism and the Discourse of Dissent

Contemporary Militarism and the Discourse of Dissent

Problems of Contemporary Militarism. Edited by Asbjørn Eide and Marek Thee. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1980. Pp. 415. $32.50.)

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Problems of Contemporary Militarism, edited by Asbjørn Eide and Marek Thee, Croom Helm, London, 1980. £14.95 (cloth)

Problems of Contemporary Militarism, edited by Asbjørn Eide and Marek Thee, <i>Croom Helm</i>, London, 1980. £14.95 (cloth)

Problems of Contemporary Militarism

Problems of Contemporary Militarism